BULLDUST !

✋ Hi family & friends  xx

We hoping everyone is well and you’re taking good care of yourselves xx

Is this place for real?  .. the middle of Australia  .. all soft and pretty? Lilac coloured evening skies, stripey mauve rocks, little purple flowers … feels like the 70’s. 🍭

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This red dust has different textures, sometimes it’s like talcum powder sticking to everything. Other times, it just brushes off like clean beach sand. Directions to one camp spot said to continue driving around behind the dunes, the red dirt ones. Then, at sunset, we climbed to the top and found Augusts’ amazing blue moon rising ⤵

.. absolute bulldust !

The soft looking pretty spinifex and other straw coloured grasses are deceiving, with your feet and ankles either cut, stabbed or 🔪 sliced as soon as you step out of the car.  😷 The 30cm ends stay inserted until you remove them, reminding me of accupuncture every time. But even though it’s free, the pain doesn’t go away. 👎 The fine dust disguises spinifex injuries with its unusual, haemoglobin shade of red and bruising is camouflaged, amongst all these lovely mauves. 💡 Hey Jackie, we should give the first aid clinic a makeover … red & purple. 👆

Alice Springs and  Darwin seem to be the only towns in the Northern Territory that provide competing supermarkets and department stores like Kmart, to rival the limited versions of Target Country. The distance apart is 1500km’s, imagine the disadvantage of trying to buy groceries and household items within budget, on top of fuel prices.⛽  That probably helps.⤵

🚩The local Arrernte peoples’ indigenous name for Alice Springs is Mparntwe.  ✂ There is a college in Alice offering Salon Management but the two teachers have left, so one day a week a teacher flies in from Darwin.  🍣The sushi shop runs out of stock by 2pm and ♣Lassiter’s Casino has the best Thai food in town, but you’d need a stack of black poker chips to eat there. 💰 💭The local hairdresser confessed she hasn’t seen Uluru yet, even though she moved to Alice Springs 12 years ago.

Surrounding the Alice township are high, craggy hills and approaching from the south, the Stuart Highway cuts through The Gap, an epic and severe looking break in the eastern end of the West McDonnell Ranges.  We often drove through it from our campsite, acknowledging the epicness … being on our gap year, and all that. 😸

👍The medical services out here are excellent but …

.. 👎 they can only do 130km’s an hour

These amazing Wedgetails are often standing next to the highway, with major attitude. They don’t even fly off as you drive past, we stopped and got pretty close, there were 5 of them.

Mum ! ⤴that Wedgetail Eagle was huge, maybe 3.5 ft high.

After leaving Alice we headed into the West MacDonnell Ranges. They start just out of town and continue west for over 160ks. What a surprise they were, extremely pretty, it was impossible to avoid feeling all overcome and dreamy while soaking up the scenery. 🙏

One of the overnight rest areas  👉 $0.00

Man heaven 🔥Pick any  fireplace

Cruising along the Red Centre Way, between the Ranges, it was such epic scenery on both sides, with heaps of different places to check out. We spent 3 days out there but as it’s only a stretch of 150ks, you could do the return trip from Alice in a day,  just picking out a few of the best spots to see.  You would call that a fabulous roadtrip for sure, up there with the big guns like Uluru.

.. beautiful little Major Mitchell’s 💟

… our first dingo visitor

Hey, ein Dingo meines Schuh!    You can guess that one x

Ellery Creek Big Hole: 💙 11° ,  too cold for a swim 👎

⤴Ochre Pits: The Arrernte people still access them for ceremonial purposes. ⤵

The MacDonnell Ranges are about 340 million years old.  All the animals were just lazying around happily being prehistoric when suddenly, two massive tectonic plates collided underground causing rocks deep down to twist and fold together before exploding upwards. 💥

Ormiston Gorge:

Looks like a million stairs, Shirl

.. and a million rocks

never enough rocks, John 💟

yeah

📷 Beauty in the raw

Simpsons Gap:  LOOK !
More fabulous ROCKS !

Northern Territory’s tallest mountains are here and I read that the MacDonnell Ranges’ Larapinta 223km Trail is ranked as one of the planet’s top 20 treks. 🌏🎿

After spending 3 days in the Ranges we’d planned to keep heading to Kings Canyon but it meant taking a 200km dirt road that everybody was shaking their heads at. John was still keen until an off-road tour bus driver told us the road condition was the worse he’d ever seen. 🎬

😇It was time to be sensible, there’s no phone reception out there, we were already 200ks west of Alice Springs with hardly any people on the road and knowing spare tyres don’t grow on trees. So we changed our minds, even though it meant backtracking 200ks just to Alice, (the same distance via the dirt to Kings Canyon)  then another 500ks travelling on tar = 700km detour.

Hi Al xxxx The old Ghan main engine,  just south of Alice

These guides stop roadside and send their international guests into the scrub to collect wood for fabulous fires. You can tell where they collect it by the piles of stripped branches roadside that were knocked back. 👎

You’re breaking a few safety rules, Shirl !

Part 1, the RangesRanges

You could rate the West Macdonnell Ranges up there with the big guns, a fabulous road trip full of surprises.

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💟My body guard, it’s Saturday night out here

Bye for now everyone, stay safe and lot’s of love,

Shirley & John xx

ps:  💙 Wherever you are Casey, we’re thinking of you, darling 💙